


storytellers

by bebtea



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fear, Hearing Voices, Kuan Hui lives au, Mental Instability, Minor Character Death, Season 2, THIS IS DEPRESSING
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:08:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27287704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bebtea/pseuds/bebtea
Summary: “You are not the first.”Years after their escape, Kuan Hui and Isabel Lovelace arrive back at the USS Hephaestus. And while everyone else is struggling to get along, Hui’s struggling to tell real from not real.
Relationships: Victoire Fourier & Kuan Hui, Victoire Fourier/Kuan Hui
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	storytellers

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: I sent this to my friend who hasn’t listened to the show, and her response was “and you say this is supposed to be a comedy podcast?!”  
> So make of that what you will.

Captain Isabel Lovelace eases open the door of the escape craft - and freezes. In front of her, she sees the same blue strip lighting they left behind running around the station walls, a hard faced woman in the same grey uniform as hers, accompanied by a gormless-looking man in sweatpants. They watch each other for slow seconds, pistols pointed.

A younger man is shadowing the Captain, too, the gun in his hand awkward and unnatural there. He has the pallid, pinched look of someone who has been sick and starving for a long time. His hair is overlong, kept out of his face by a ragged bandana, and his eyes are empty, years beyond broken as he stares past her, out into the cold light of the docking bay, out at the other crew.

“So,” Lovelace says, finger on the trigger. “This really is the Hephaestus.”

Her shadow laughs a little. 

“Wow. This is one hell of a nightmare.”

The Captain shakes her head. “Hui... I’m so sorry, but... you’re awake.”

His forearm sports a circle of bruises where he’s pinched it to check if he’s dreaming. He jabs at it again with his thumb, and hisses through his teeth. The other crew stare, fear and discomfort and pity flitting across their faces.

“Oh  _ goddamnit _ .”

And then Lovelace’s composure breaks. “Why? Why did you bring us back here?!”

* * *

“So uh, these are your new quarters, I guess. All made up for you by yours truly...” Eiffel trails off, scratching the back of his head awkwardly as he bounces foot to foot in the zero-g.

Hui nods. “Thanks.” This used to be  _ her  _ room, but he’s not going to say that.

“Listen, dude, if you ever want to share lab-rat stories-“

He slides the door shut in the comms officer’s face, slams his bag in the locker on the wall, and buries his head in his hands.  _ Just breathe. Just breathe. Breathe, breathe, breathe.  _ What was the name of the mother program? Not quite Rhea, something similar...

“...Hera?”

“Yes, Dr Hui?”

“I really don’t want to be a bother but I, I don’t do so good when I’m alone. Could you, maybe talk to me a little bit?”

She’s still unsure of him, a little glitchy, her voice cold. But perhaps he’s a pathetic enough figure to win her sympathy, because she sighs. “What would you like to talk about?”

“I mean, an AI must have a really unique perspective on the stars…”

Her voice brightens - surrounded by soldiers and specialists, she’s never met an astrophysicist before. “What do you know about the colour spectrum?”

* * *

Before, when he’d had Victoire, they’d talked about the sky like this. At the end of a long shift, her hair pulled out of its bun and floating in waves around her head as she rattled off theories in particle physics or recited poems she’d had hothoused into her brain, always so serious on the outside but taking his teasing with a grin. They’d talked, and talked, and built castles in recycled air. They just had to get back to Earth, then she’d take him to that little Belgian pastry shop she’d loved as a child. The escape craft just had to work, and he’d take her to the planetarium where he learned to love the universe, and afterwards his parents’ restaurant, to get every single question about her life thrown at her. “So you can  _ really  _ test your Chinese skills.”

“I’ll have you know my school taught me excellent Mandarin already,” she’d replied, breaking into it with a snide smile. “And you’ve more than filled in what they skipped out.”

He’d laughed back at that, a proper laugh, his cheeks warm with the feel of it. He’d kicked off the ceiling and floated upside down beside her, and planted a kiss on her forehead before hightailing it out of the observation deck.

“Kuan Hui! You, you, you can’t just - you get back here!”

* * *

He settles into some kind of routine. Reveille after a couple of hours trying to doze off without screaming the space station out of orbit. Ersatz toothpaste. Ersatz coffee. Ration brick. Work. Analysing every star in the system for their unique radiographic readings. His hands are shaking again. Shaking, shaking,  _ shaking _ , making it hard to concentrate. The Captain is stomping around and breaking things and breaking herself. The tension is nothing new: he’s lived three years up here. He no longer tries to involve himself in the dramatics. He keeps himself to himself; he keeps someone in his line of sight at all times.

Minkowski is worried about his mental health. Eiffel has rolled his eyes and wound a finger next to his head a fair few times behind his back. Lovelace is so unspeakably angry it’s better not to say anything to her.

Hera gets it, a little, her tone steeped in pity.

And somehow, to Selburg’s endless confusion, the bioweapon running through his veins isn’t killing him any more. “So hey, that’s a bonus?”, Eiffel tries. Hui doesn’t particularly care. The one and only time Selburg tried to get a look at him, he’d had a panic attack, essentially blacked out, and woke up to Lovelace breaking the biologist’s arm in three places.

Anyway, maybe his mental health  _ is _ questionable, because he’s started to hear Victoire in the walls.

* * *

It’s quiet at first - just a scratching, maybe, at the back of his head. Then at night, behind Hera’s reading of an audiobook. She’s saying the same words along, at the same time.

It’s probably imaginary. After all, how many times did she read him  _ Northanger Abbey  _ and  _ Peter Pan _ when the sickness got worse and he was strapped to a gurney in the medical wing? Times innumerable, even when she was pulling triple shifts to decouple the nuclear reactor from the VX5.

“We haven’t got time for this, Dr Fourier!” The Captain had snapped at one point, and Victoire had snapped right on back. 

“If we haven’t got time for stories, we may as well be dead already.”

He recalls that, now. Stories. Stories were always the way out. Her hands swimming through the air as she described a summer evening back home, a little shimmer of rain on the cobbles, people eating outside and playing music, cycling down twisting streets, diplomats and tourists and ordinary people all knocking into each other’s lives. An evening that tasted like champagne bubbles. It was always those stories he liked the best, though he wouldn’t admit it, and used to complain that there weren’t enough dinosaurs.

“You’re a troglodyte,” she’d sniffed back. He’d chuckled.

_ So, here’s a story.  _ There once was a man who should be dead, and a woman who should have made it. It’s a familiar story, at least for this station.

* * *

Another night. He can hear her in the walls. There’s definitely  _ something,  _ scratching, fingernails, a giggle from a direction he can’t pinpoint. Hera’s doing a full reset - there’s no voice to mask the sounds of the station creaking, twisting, whispering.

He thought he knew fear. He’s shaken hands with abject terror more times than he can count since that time in solitary, years ago now but still haunting, with the silence so pressing he thought the walls were closing in, his voice slipping away, crying  _ don’t, don’t, don’t, not again  _ and Victoire’s voice shaking but condemning him to another week of it, Captain’s orders. This might be the same thing; one of Command’s sick little games, an attempt to crack the crew and turn them on each other.

_ Kuan, where are you? I’m scared. _

Well, he’s already cracked.

“Victoire?” He’s fumbling with the buckles in the bunk, even as his last shred of sanity is screaming at him to stay in bed.

_ Let me out! Please! I don’t know what to do! _

“Victoire! I’m coming, where are you?!”

_ It’s so dark, it’s really really dark.  _ She’s crying. She never let anyone but him see her cry.  _ Merde, mon Dieu, aidez-moi! Kuan! _

“Victoire! Tell me where you are! Which deck?”

_ I… I’m in here, it’s been… it’s been... _

“Here?” He knocks on the wall. It echoes a little. He hears a knock back. The vents. She’s in the vents!

“Hey there, you wanna think about this, kid?” That’s Officer Fisher, taking over duty for his AWOL common sense. He can squint and picture the beefy engineer leaning in the door frame, tossing a spanner hand-to-hand. “Seems like following voices of long dead people might not be the best play. But then, I’m also long dead, so-”

“Shut up, Fisher. I saw you get jettisoned, I saw… I saw Lovelace lose grip on your hand, I was watching your vitals when your helmet…” He breaks off. “But we don’t know what happened to her, she vanished, she  _ left  _ me.”

_ I… I want you to know I didn’t leave you, Kuan, I would never leave you... _

Hui slides open the bedroom door, and swings himself down to the supply closet. Spanner for unscrewing the panels, torch between his teeth, gun for good measure.

“Kid…”

He slaps the side of his head, and the ghost flickers disapprovingly out of view. Right. Now for easing the bolts, one, two, three. The fourth one sticks, for a minute, and then he’s successful, easing off the panel with a  _ clang  _ loud enough to wake everyone on the station. He holds his breath, one, two, three. Clear. He eases himself up through the air vent, and crawls towards her voice.

* * *

“It’s your station,  _ Commander _ ! How can a man just go missing?! We’re in deep space!”

“Oh,  _ now  _ it’s my station. Of course, when something goes  _ wrong,  _ it’s my station!”

“Uh, ladies?” Eiffel attempts, for the fourth time, to interrupt their raging feud. “Do we want to maybe consider finding Dr Hui rather than yelling at each other?”

“Lovelace, Hui isn’t coming up on any internal systems. I just think we have to consider the possibility that he may have-“

“Kuan Hui is the bravest man I know,” Lovelace grits her teeth, a second away from slapping Minkowski in the face. “He wouldn’t leave me alone.”

Eiffel raises an eyebrow. “I don’t know, Starman isn’t exactly… you know… compos mentis?” 

Minkowski sighs as Lovelace swings away from her and predictably grabs him by the collar.

“Would  _ you _ be compos mentis if you watched your friend die in the hospital bed next to you by choking on his own lungs, knowing that you’re next, Eiffel?” Her voice goes deadly soft as she tightens her grip. “What if you got tortured because Command wanted to prove a point? If the woman you loved disappeared just before you thought you were free? And after all that you end up back where you started? Now imagine you’re a civilian.  _ You  _ tell me how that would feel.”

“Not… good… Captain.  _ Agh.  _ Point made. _ ” _

“You show that man some goddamn respect or I’ll gut you.”

“I said... point proven… sir.”

“Lovelace, lay off. Eiffel, shut up. I want a full sweep of the station done. Meet back here at 0800, radio in if you find anything promising. Understood?”

“You got it, Commander,” Eiffel splutters, rubbing his neck reproachfully.

* * *

Minkowski knows the vents best from her monster hunting days; she finds him at last in the crawlspace behind his room, hunched into a ball, stiff with cold.

“Dr Hui,” she tries, as gently as possible. “Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay. Let’s just get out of here, back to the main station, you’ll-“

And then, she sees it, just past him. A half-decomposed corpse, eyeless, bloodless, flesh peeled away and back, wrapped in a rag of a labcoat, Hui’s fingers interlocked with the crumbling bones of its hand. The shutter of a recorder, flicking on again when the air recycling system starts.

_ Okay, this should work. I’m in here, now, the crawlspace that Rhea doesn’t have on cams. I’ve been here about three hours. So hey, Kuan. It’s Victoire. I… don’t know how long I have, or how you’ll ever even hear this but I… I don’t want to go without saying goodbye. I… I want you to know I didn’t leave you, Kuan, I would never leave you. But I did the maths. There’s not enough room for all of us on the escape shuttle and I… well, I didn’t want the Captain to have to choose. I know she couldn’t live with herself. My time’s limited, anyway. My hair’s started falling out.  _ She chuckles.  _ Got a bit too close to the VX5, I suppose.  _

_ I know if I tell the Captain, she’ll try and save me. She doesn’t know when to quit. And you’re so, so sick, Kuan, but maybe there’s a cure back on Earth. There’s no cure for radiation poisoning this bad, I know that. Chances are, I won’t even make it home. So, I’m staying here. I’ve got a book, and some of the last ration bricks. It won’t be too long. _

A click, a new recording.

_ Okay, it’s a bit lonely. I’m down to my last ration bar, so I need to do something else to pass the time. And I know how much you love this. So, ahem. Jane Eyre, Chapter One... _

Click.

_ Kuan, where are you? I… I’m scared. I don’t… I don’t think I want to die alone. _

Click. She’s in tears.

_ Let me out! Please! I don’t know what to do! It’s so dark, it’s really really dark _ .  _ Merde, mon Dieu, aidez-moi! Kuan! _

Click.

_ Je t'aime et je suis désolé. Je t’aime… _

Click. Her voice is heavy and rasping and slow.

_ Do you think our story was a good one, in the end? _


End file.
